reading

The absence of a proper history of Gaelic football was one of the things that fascinated and disappointed me from a very early age when my love of reading crossed over with my love of sport. It was something I wanted to redress myself if nobody else did. The ambition to do so sent me to spend many, many hours, almost all the discretionary time I could muster, at the long tables of the National Library in Dublin and the Russell Library in Maynooth, poring over yellowing pages and wondering at the extraordinary descriptions I found there of long-forgotten exploits, scores, matches, disputes, opinions, heroes and villains.

A casual interest became a passion, almost an obsession, and my desire to share, to correct, to challenge, led me to retell some of this material and to muster others to do the same. When I wrote my first Gaelic football book in my teens, the shelf was short and the readership small.

Thankfully all that has changed. The shelf, or shelves, are longer and more treasure-laden, as writers, players, administrators and managers commit their thoughts and anecdotes, observations and analysis to print. As for myself, I continued to feel that the story of football is bigger, more complex and more intriguing than anything I or others had managed to convey. We owe it to the players who left us this legacy to retell the story of their achievements.

I have no doubt that today’s Gaelic footballers are faster, fitter, stronger and better prepared than the ones who played in previous generations. In sports that can be measured, athletic performances have improved beyond anything that could have been predicted. Ronnie Delany’s gold medal-winning performance in Melbourne in 1956 would not be fast enough to qualify him for the London Olympics in 2012. Maybe the same is true of footballers. Dick Fitzgerald, Paddy Kennedy or even Mick O’Connell might not be good enough to make a Kerry team nowadays, or tactically fitted to face a tough championship match against Tyrone.

But thankfully it doesn’t work like that. The greats of many, many years ago remain great, and probably get greater as they pass on. This book is a tribute to all those who made life happy through good times and bad for generations of Irish sports followers.

At the time of the GAA centenary in 1984, renowned film-maker Louis Marcus, who was once nominated for an Oscar, was searching for any footage that might help illustrate a documentary about the games he was making. The archive system at documentary-makers Pathé was not as sophisticated as he had hoped. But Louis had a lead; somebody had found a few lengths of footage in a drawer in New Ross.

The transfer process was difficult. Marcus and his team had to find a machine capable of transferring the ancient film on to something more readable. It disintegrated as they did so.

But when he sat back to watch the piece of film he had found, he had a surprise in store. The film was of Gaelic football all right, but it was very old. It had a throw-in instead of a sideline kick. The foggy group of players were kicking the ball along the ground, rather than attempting any fancy catching. A mascot was clearly shouting ‘Up Kerry’ for the camera. It didn’t take long to figure out that this footage was from 1914, the All-Ireland final between Kerry and Wexford, and the oldest film footage in existence. And across the grainy distance of seven decades he was looking into the face of Dick Fitzgerald.

‘If there are five pieces of advice I would dispense after my long years in management they are these: be your own person, always trust your instincts, take calculated chances, give your players confidence, and never select a player who is carrying an injury, no matter how good he is.’

MICK O’DWYER, Blessed and Obsessed (2007)

Dick Fitzgerald wrote the first instructional book on Gaelic football in 1914. Much of his book was spent lauding the changes in the game and defending it against its opponents. Some of the points he made are still valid a hundred years later.

•The defence must be beaten before any score can be registered against them, and the defence is usually beaten by being drawn, as footballers say, or deceived by some ruse or other.

•We feel bound to maintain stoutly that the fielding of the ball should ever be recognised as an essential and most attractive feature of our game, and the rules which secure this attribute of Gaelic football should be allowed to stand in the Gaelic code.

•Gaelic football is what may be called a natural football game. There is no incentive in it towards rough play. One player can hamper or impede another in one way, and only one way, and that by means of the shoulder. Hence it is that severe tackling, rough handling and all forms of tripping are banned.

•True it is that there is a tendency on the part of the greatest exponents of the game to pick up the ball with the foot, transfer to the hands, and get in a long punt. If that excellent feat can be executed with great rapidity, we must admit that it is all that can be desired. But unfortunately there are occasions when a back has not time to stop or stoop to handle the ball. The ball must then be kicked as it runs, or the situation is lost.

•We do not count on the two midfield men for regular and defined combination, for they are supposed to have a roving commission. One bit of advice to the midfield men is not out of place or unnecessary. They should resist the tendency to play amongst their own backs when the latter appear to be sorely pressed. The backs should be allowed to do their own work, and interference with them by any of the eight forwards, the midfield men included, would be rather detrimental to a successful defence. The backs must be permitted to work out their own salvation.

•Occasions will occur when the centre forward, after passing the ball on to either scorer, may expect the latter to re-pass to himself. All this manoeuvring is feasible enough between competent men who know one another’s play.

•It would appear desirable to look for good height and a fair amount of weight in the centre one of the three scorers.

•If notwithstanding the centre scorer be rather on the light side, he must have other compensating qualities. The Irish saying applies to this case: the man who is not strong needs to be cunning.

•The referee should be as active on the field as most of the players. He must make the players feel he will tolerate no serious breaches of the rules. At the same time he must not err on the side of severity by keeping his whistle blowing like a foghorn at sea. He must be prepared to temper justice with mercy, and overlook, therefore, accidental infringements of the rules.

•Consequently he should be a youngish man and physically fit to keep going from one end of the ground to the other. Our Irish temperament would appear to be more controllable in the hands of a referee who is familiar with members of the teams.

‘Training must always be undertaken in a spirit of light-heartedness and freedom from worry.’

DR EAMONN O’SULLIVAN

Dick Fitzgerald’s slim volume was to serve a generation of footballers. Larry Stanley wrote a fascinating instructional manual for Gaelic footballers in the 1940s, but it was only distributed among Garda members. In effect, little changed between 1914, when Fitzgerald wrote his manual, and the 1950s. Kerry’s trainer during those years, presiding over thirteen All-Ireland victories after 1924, was Dr Eamonn O’Sullivan, son of a champion athlete and captain of Kerry’s first finalists in 1891, and a fourth placed hurdler in the 1932 Olympics.

The Doctor, as he was affectionately known in Kerry, preached that players should stick rigorously to their field positions, because ‘close adherence to positioning by the forwards opens up play and gives more scope to each player for the development of scoring opportunities. What has been described as machine forward play is based entirely on positioning and is incapable of development when indiscriminate wandering to other sectors leads to bunching.’

Seán Murphy recalled the policy. ‘Just as if you were driving a car, you’re in a tight squeeze, you can’t look left or right, you have to drive instinctively and get an instinctive feel for your position,’ he told Joe Ó Muircheartaigh in the 2008 history of football in Kerry, Princes of Pigskin.

Dr Eamonn elaborated on a whole variety of basic skills: follow the centre line of the ball in catching and kicking; follow through a kick; never hesitate; clasp ball to the chest; pass only when necessary; cover opponent’s kicks; hop the ball only to gain time; train on the weak foot. The programme that he introduced at full-time collective training sessions makes intriguing reading today. Evening training was out of the question because of the transport problems of the time, so employers were asked to release players to go into full-time training. It sounded suspiciously professional for an all-amateur game. Some counties adopted the practice for provincial finals. Kerry always waited until the All-Ireland final. (When they went into full-time training for the All-Ireland semi-final replay against Cavan in 1952, they were beaten.) There they would live under the Dr Eamonn O’Sullivan military-like regime:

8.00 am Arise.

8.30 am All assemble for short walk before breakfast.

9.00 am Breakfast.

9.30 am Complete relaxation.

11.00 am All assemble at training ground for short lecture and field manoeuvre in togs.

1.30 pm Lunch.

3.30 pm Complete rest and relaxation after chief meal.

4.00 pm All assemble at training ground for short lecture and training exercise.

6.00 pm Evening meal.

6.30 pm Complete relaxation.

8.00 pm Walks, recreation etc.

10.30 pm Supper.

11.00 pm Retire.

By 1954 the idea was becoming outdated. Evening training was more viable. On purist, amateur grounds, training was abolished at the 1954 congress, and Kerry, surprisingly, lost the following All-Ireland final to Meath, some say as a result of the move. Four years later, Dr Eamonn produced a book, The Art and Science of Gaelic Football, but the game technique he had published was already becoming outdated.

The doctor was so inflexible that he did not believe in switching a left-hand midfielder for a right-side midfielder. When in 1962, one of the last finals in which all six forwards lined up with the midfielders for the throw-in, Kerry snatched a goal in the first minute, everyone in the Kerry backroom team was happy except one. According to the doctor, goalscorer Garry MacMahon should have stayed on his own side and Paudie Sheehy should have been in position to take the chance. When Tom Ashe scored a point for Kerry against Louth in the All-Ireland semi-final of 1953, Dr Eamonn upbraided him for leaving his area to score the point.

Veteran RTÉ commentator Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh recalls how O’Sullivan, a psychiatrist at St Brendan’s in Killarney, acted as a sports psychologist before his time. He once congratulated Paudie Sheehy, then suspected of hanging on to the ball a little too long, on a goal he had scored. ‘I didn’t score it,’ Paudie protested. ‘But it was your pass that made it,’ said the doctor, and went off to leave Paudie thinking about what he had said.

‘Dr Eamonn’s presence seemed to dominate the footballers,’ the 1959 player of the year Seán Murphy recalls. ‘He was bigger than the team itself: his demeanour, the way he stood, the confidence he exuded. He immersed the team in a psychological process. You felt he was going to win the match for us.’

Ó Muircheartaigh reflects that the doctor’s rigorist positional game was based on the enormous confidence he had in the superiority of Kerry footballers. A truth, universally acknowledged among followers of the game in the south-west, is that a Kerry footballer will always be more skilful than an opponent. Skilful players need space in which to operate. Bunching was to be avoided at all costs. Kerry backs could kick downfield with the knowledge that the Kerry forward would beat his opponent every time if they had enough space. The doctor’s theory served Kerry teams well. Lesser football mortals had to find something more flexible.

‘It is not so very long ago, since the very knowledgeable people were shaking their heads and dishevelling their hair over what they pronounced the corpse of Kerry football. Kerry, they said, had paid the penalty for being too rigid and tradition bound. The game had passed them out. Failure to adapt to new ideas and new methods had found Kerry lagging behind. And while Down and Galway and others were dividing the spoils between them, the funeral of Kerry football was being well attended by those who could hardly catch and only kicked when no alternative appeared.’

Programme article for All-Ireland final, possibly by BRENDAN MAC LUA, 1970

Doctor Eamonn’s theories saw off many challengers. Kildare, using a hand passing game, were described as technically better than their opponents in several finals in which they were beaten by Kerry. When Antrim came south using a particularly fast version of the hand pass in 1946, Kerry solved that problem by tackling the man before he got the ball. It brought howls of derision and protest from the supporters at the game. They boohed the Kerry man who was sent off after one Antrim player became a victim of an assassination attempt when the ball was not in his vicinity at all. After the game, protests crowded in from people everywhere who loved the spectacle Antrim offered. The letters section of the Evening Mail was filled for weeks. ‘Like Nuremberg’, Joe Keohane described the condemnation. But Kerry had shown that old ways are best, and went on to win the 1946 All-Ireland while Antrim went back into obscurity.

Peter O’Reilly, who learned his football in St Canice’s on the North Circular Road and played senior for Dublin before he was 18, tinkered with the traditional 3-3-2-3-3 positioning of players when he coached Dublin teams. In the 1954 Leinster final, full forward Kevin Heffernan strayed out of position, taking the highly reputed Meath full back Paddy O’Brien with him. Dublin scored five goals to put the All-Ireland champions out of the championship, and Heffernan contributed to three of the Dublin goals. Heffernan was not the first ‘roving’ full forward, but never had a legendary name in football been so completely outfoxed by a wandering forward.

Dublin were tipped to win the All-Ireland. The team that stopped them was Dr Eamonn’s Kerry, playing football that was as traditional as ever. Tom Woulfe concluded afterwards: ‘If Dublin had won in 1955, Gaelic football would have developed more rapidly.’

O’Reilly’s football was fast and open. Mick O’Connell was among those who were impressed: ‘It was no accident that some of the best games of the 1950s and early 60s were those in which the Dublin team was involved. Their attractive brand of combination football was almost totally constructive and they were never wont to adopt spoiling tactics to beat the other side. This was probably their undoing in not harvesting more championships, but it was certainly conducive to open, continuous football.’ O’Connell ranked the 1959 semi-final between Dublin and Kerry as one of the fastest, most open and best to watch in his entire career.

By 1959 a new Down team, based on the Queen’s University team of 1958 that had won the Sigerson Cup, won the Ulster championship in extraordinary style. Their tactic was to bear down on the player in possession and to leave players unmarked everywhere. In 1960 Down won the league and beat a stronger Cavan team in the Ulster final by breaking the ball in midfield rather than attempting to catch it. It involved bunching of the type that would have given Dr Eamonn nightmares. But it worked.

Lennon’s 1963 Coaching Gaelic Football for Champions was the polar opposite of Doctor O’Sullivan, preaching interchangeability for full backs, speed to back up the forwards for half backs, a block system of midfielders arranging back-up for the breaking ball, a more roving role for midfielders, half forwards who are prepared to back-pass and help out defence, as well as range in on the opposition goal, and speedy full forwards with lots of free movement among the forwards but little or none among the backs. Joe Lennon wrote: ‘The position of midfield is probably wrongly blamed more often than any other position on the field. There is a tendency to lay too much stress on the comparative influence of midfield play. Although strength in midfield is often the key to success, it is seldom acknowledged that the amount of good a midfielder does depends to a large extent on the play of the rest of the team.’

Lennon admitted that his ideas, which ‘sounded original’, were already being practised by the best players, even if subconsciously. He directed the first GAA national coaching course in 1964. Their opponents’ response to the fluid Down game was predictable. The referee had to be escorted to the dressing room after both the 1961 and 1966 Ulster finals broke into fist fights, and the free-flowing football degenerated into pulling and dragging.

Kerry blamed their team, not their tactics, when they lost to Down in 1961 and 1968. Joe Lennon’s remark in 1968 that Kerry tactics were ‘ten years out of date’ was a direct reference to Doctor Eamonn’s 1958 book.

Ten years further on, Down colleague Seán O’Neill was to say that he ‘did not think it was possible for a Gaelic team to arrive as fit as Kerry did for an All-Ireland final. They have brought an entirely new dimension to football.’

‘The transformation of Kerry football in 1975 was as profound as anything that has ever happened in the history of the game in the county,’ Mick O’Dwyer wrote in his 2007 biography, Blessed and Obsessed. ‘Our style had changed from catch and kick to a new inclusive game where every player’s individual skills were fitted into the pattern rather than the other way round.’

‘At the very start, Tony O’Brien hit the side netting after a mix-up in the Kerry defence. Ironically it was the nearest Laois came to scoring.’

The Irish Times report on Kerry’s 6-11 to nil victory over Laois, 4 December 1978

The reintroduction of the hand pass in 1975 reinforced an emphasis on fitness that was to engulf the game in the 1970s. Dublin manager Kevin Heffernan introduced Brian Trimble and John Furlong into his football panel briefly in 1973, not because they could play football, but to set higher standards in the sprints for the squad. When this was achieved, they stopped coming to the sessions.

Coaching methods were being imported from abroad. Mickey Whelan studied sports science in the US. A trickle of players went to Strawberry Hill in London in the 1960s pursuing PE teaching careers, and eventually Thomond College in Limerick opened.

When 1970s Offaly manager Eugene McGee and Richie Connor paid a visit to Highbury in London to watch soccer club Arsenal train in 1976, they were astonished how little physical training was involved. Their physical training had been done in the month before the beginning of the season. During the season they were just tipping the ball around at training, maintaining freshness rather than fitness.

The idea of winter training pre-dated the Kerry and Dublin teams of the late 1970s, but their fitness levels were so far ahead of everyone else that they dominated the championship for two decades. Kerry won their six All-Ireland semi-finals against Connacht and Ulster opposition between 1975 and 1982 by 17, 16, 12, 22, 16 and 10 points. On 2 December 1978 Kerry beat Laois 6-11 to nil in a National League match.

Midfield had been imbued with almost mythic importance by Dr Eamonn and Dick Fitzgerald. Teams had set out to disrupt this with a deep-lying centre half forward, as with Dublin’s Bill Casey in 1965, or a spare player, as with Kerry’s Seamus Fitzgerald in a league match against Offaly in 1969. The third midfielder, used in November 1970 by Dublin in a National League match against Offaly, was used again by Dublin against Kerry in the 1984 All-Ireland final and became a staple of the 1980s.

By the end of the 1980s there were ladders in training sessions, and the backroom teams of inter-county football teams were growing to include dieticians, psychologists and chemists.

Meath manager Seán Boylan had been a pioneer of new training techniques. When he was suddenly elevated from hurling physio to football manager in 1983, he saw his role as ‘getting the players fit to play at top level, realise you can’t store fitness, realise it is something that has to be worked at and, if you do get injured, realise the effect that will have on your muscles.’

He brought his squad to the Hill of Tara for uphills and downhills, utilising its spiritual significance as well as its physical attributes. He trained his team on the beach at Bettystown, having learned that athletes can train in water, despite a variety of injuries.

In the spring of 1991, Seán Boylan had the team training in swimming pools at Navan and Gormanston, despite the fact that many of them could not swim, until the week before they played Dublin in what was to become a famous encounter in the first round of the Championship.

‘We tried hard to keep everything fairly confidential. Imagine being beaten in the first round of the Championship and then revealing that you had been training in water. We could never face the people of Meath. I’d prefer to be running around a training field, thinking about Dublin, but this is one of those occasions when Seán asked us to trust him. So we thrashed in the water, up to our necks, for an hour’, Liam Hayes wrote in his biography, Out of Our Skins.

‘Before parting with the ball the winger should try—after having beaten one man already, let us suppose for possession—to draw another back away from the man to whom he intends passing the ball.’

DICK FITZGERALD, How to Play Gaelic Football (1914)

The need for room to practise skills was as great for the players of 2004 as it was for Dick Fitzgerald’s men in 1914 or Dr Eamonn’s men in 1924. So was the need to speed up the game, a subject of debate in the 1980s as much as it had been at the convention of 1937 or of 1891.

The solution was found in the unlikeliest of places, Australia. Sustaining that improvement was the job left to the rule-makers. The Australian series of 1984 and 1986 showed the GAA it had a pedestrian game compared with its Australian counterpart. Two-thirds of the time the ball was out of play, being retrieved for line balls, frees and kick-outs. A group of football thinkers under former Dublin player Tony Hanahoe was asked to confront this problem during 1988. The breathtakingly simple solution was borrowed straight from the Australian game. Take all kick-outs, frees and sideline balls from the hands instead of from the ground. The hand pass was brought back after its eight-year sojourn under a new definition: ‘Pass the ball with one or both hands provided that there is a definite striking action with the hands.’ Another proposal allowing players on the run to scoop up the ball with one hand was eventually abandoned, as was the decision to use quarters rather than halves. The tackle remained a grim issue. The committee proposed that a side-to-side tackle should be delivered only by the hip or shoulder to the hip or shoulder. The Australian tackle was rejected because it is a common cause of injury in Australia and is responsible for the majority of frees in the game.

That would mean there were four legal ways to challenge the player in possession of the ball in Gaelic football: from the side with one foot on the ground; flicking the ball with the open hand when it is being bounced or toe-tapped; blocking down an intended kick or pass; and shadowing or shepherding an opponent to force him to stop, turn or move wide. The effect was immediate. The amount of time the ball was in play doubled. The new rules were eighteen months in operation when Dublin and Meath showed them off to their fullest extent in four Leinster Championship meetings in 1991.

Was it seven passes or eleven before the Kevin Foley goal that decided the series? The question reflects exactly what the impact of those Tony Hanahoe rule changes had on the game. You wouldn’t know it, but it was two moves. The first had four passes, the second seven. Martin O’Connell to Mick Lyons to Matty McCabe to Liam Harnan to Colm O’Rourke. O’Rourke was fouled. In the old days this would have meant a stoppage of about a minute and a hefty downfield kick. Instead O’Rourke took a quick free to David Beggy, to Kevin Foley, to P. J. Gillic, to Tommy Dowd, to Colm O’Rourke, to Dowd again and to Kevin Foley for the goal.

The second most dramatic goal in Gaelic football history would not have happened under the rules that applied for 104 of the previous 106 years.

‘We have always made a clear distinction between the man who is fleet of foot and the man, not necessarily over fast, who is ready to do what is to be done.’

DICK FITZGERALD, How to Play Gaelic Football (1914)

As the game was speeding up and space was opening on every football field on the island, there were those who schemed to close it down again. The nineties and noughties were defined by matches that defined new limitations as well as the new heights of the game.

Alongside the epoch-making excitement of the 1991 series of matches between Dublin and Meath, something that showed the potential of Gaelic football for immersing itself in Irish popular culture, the 1994 Down v Derry match, which many regarded as the best ever, and the classic purist’s All-Ireland final of 1998, were games where the stoppers triumphed, notably Meath’s semi-final against Tyrone in 1996 and Tyrone’s semi-final against Kerry in 2003.

Meath manager Seán Boylan denies accusations that his team were the originators of the blanket defence. ‘It was not blanket defence. It was just being available. You had worked hard enough in winning the ball. There was no point raffling it. The intensity of the Dublin-Meath championship matches was ferocious. If Dublin won, that was fine. If Meath won, that was fine. Once it was over, it was over. It might not have been pretty for some people, but it was still admired by many others and it ultimately brought success.’

‘Only recently I was talking to an old veteran who saw the first All-Ireland football final and although he witnessed most of the big games in the intervening years, he still holds that the smallest man of the 42 was the greatest player he has witnessed in any code.’

SEAMUS Ó CEALLAIGH, Limerick Leader, 11 January 1954

Who was the best? Dick Fitzgerald glares out of that grainy 1914 footage, now safely ensconced on a loop in the GAA museum in Croke Park, and challenges us to answer.

Since Louis Marcus’s discovery, more archive footage has come to light. But it is impossible to get a sense of the ability of the great players to impose themselves on games of the 1920s from flickering newsreel taken by a dizzy camera placed behind the Railway end goal.

We see John Joe Sheehy, tall and broad shouldered, leading his 1926 team into battle; Larry Stanley jumping to attention, dropping a shoulder and springing off towards the Canal end; and Paddy McDonnell towering above his O’Tooles team mates, a man without a care in the world. But only a handful of people survive who actually saw them play.

A greatest team of all time would be easiest to pick, but was the Kerry team deprived of five in a row by a late Seamus Darby goal in 1982 superior to the Kerry team deprived of a five in a row by a late Vincent McGovern goal in 1933?

Memory serves certain players better than others. The middle-aged panels who sat down to pick the team of the century in 1984, and the team of the millennium (sic) in 1999, all picked similar types of players, those who had been at their peak when the selection panels were young and impressionable. Just one of the members of either team pre-dated the 1940s, Tommy Murphy from Laois.

Pádraig Puirséil of the Irish Press selected the team of his lifetime in 1961. He selected four of the millennium team:

The memory of Paddy Mehigan, known as ‘Carbery’ or ‘Pato’ in the various publications he wrote for, extended back to 1900 when he selected his all-time selection in 1945. His is probably the best guide to the great players of the early part of the century, and just two of them made a millennium or century selection, Dan O’Keeffe and John Joe O’Reilly.

Some of the stars of the century were overlooked by selectors of provincial teams in their own day. When High Ball magazine painstakingly went through the Railway Cup records and picked county teams based on the not exactly infallible basis of whichever player had played most in a particular position with his province, there was no shortage of disputes over the outcome. The chances were never going to be high of players like Malachi O’Brien, hero of the first All-Ireland championship in 1887, getting a fair comparison with Larry Stanley or Tommy Murphy, never mind Pat Spillane or Mick O’Connell.

So we are left with the classic sports follower’s dilemma. Who to mention and what to leave out in our attempt to tell the story of Gaelic football.

When someone refers to the sport of ‘football’, (calcio, piłka nozna, Fútbol, Futebol, Voetbal, Fußball, fotboll, fotball, fotbal, fodbold, fótbolti, jalkapallo, beldroed, nogomet, foci) in most of the world, it is assumed they are referring to the Association game as derived from a meeting in a London public house in 1863.

There are few exceptions, but these are important. In New Zealand and South Africa, it is more usually Rugby Union; in Sydney, Rugby League; in the states of Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia, it is assumed they mean Australian Rules; and in the United States and Canada it is American and Canadian football.

In Ireland it is Gaelic football, a game played by Irish ex-pats abroad, but still, 125 years after it was codified, rooted almost exclusively in its native place. Football is the game of choice in Ireland, with the largest attendances, the biggest aggregate TV audiences and the largest number of participants at every age group. Its roots in community life, especially in rural areas, may be unique among sports organisations everywhere.

The game, and its place in Irish life, is much mentioned by historians but little understood. Its history touches all the sporting staples, of heroes and mythology, exaggerated deeds and injustices, and the untold and forgotten little stories that made the big ones possible. It also helped shape the way Irish people have looked at the world, and nurtured and defined the ambitions of six generations of Irish sportsmen.

Let us go back to the days when three large ball games battled for the cherished place of being the ‘football’ of Irish sporting culture. Let’s start, as is the custom with sports fixtures, with the marching band and the pre-match build-up.

Three myths, three misses. A new way of playing football (we are told) was initiated in 1823 when William Webb Ellis, Tipperary-born son of a British army officer, picked up the ball and ran with it, defying the playground code at Rugby College in England.

Another type of football arrived in Ireland in 1869 when a Belfast merchant, John McAlery, saw Queen’s Park playing soccer while on honeymoon in Scotland. He came home, started Cliftonville, and then founded the Irish Football Association.

A third type of football was ushered into being in 1884 at a rough and tumble match between Waterford and Tipperary, when champion athletes Maurice Davin and his brother Tom started a sideline discussion. ‘You make rules for hurling, and I’ll make them for football’ went the conversation.

Foundation myths are important to sportsmen and all three have served their purpose. But they are all being consigned to mythology by recent research. Nowadays the semi-mythical Webb Ellis has rugby’s World Cup named in his honour, but even when the story was invented for a dubious centenary in 1923, it had its doubters.

The business of codifying football, transforming a pastime into a sport, started 30 years later. The invention of the pneumatic bladder was still 40 years away.

Ireland’s own football story started with the rugby code, when Trinity College rugby club was founded. It still claims to be the second oldest in the world after Guy’s Hospital in London. But even then it is clear that these rules, framed in 1654, were not the same as those played at Rugby in England. While football was widely played throughout the country in the 1860s and 70s, it was not always rugby that was played.

By the time the Irish Football Union (after 1880 the IRFU) tried organising the existing clubs in 1873, there were far more clubs on the island than the 40 that were affiliated during the decade. Soccer was also played by at least three clubs before McAlery’s honeymoon, which apparently wasn’t even a honeymoon. Soccer’s foundation myth emerged in the 1920s and was documented by Malcolm Brodie, the Belfast Telegraph soccer writer from the 1950s to the 80s. McAlery’s contribution to history was in founding the Irish FA, but the impact of the sport he loved was a highly localised affair.

So to Gaelic, whose rules were drawn up, rather incongruously, by a former holder of the world record hammer throw, Maurice Davin, in December 1884 or January 1885, and presented to the third meeting of the fledgling Gaelic Athletic Association. The ‘you make the rules for football’ conversation was transformed from foundation myth to documented source by another world hammer throw record-holder James Mitchel. He was one of the GAA athletes who went to America with an 1888 fundraising exhibition tour, the ‘invasion’, and never returned. He became a sportswriter with the New York Sun and a source for the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, including the entry on Gaelic games.

‘A riot happened near Finglas bridge among a parcel of Fellows playing football, in which one of them had his skull fractured and his nose partly cut off.’

Slater’s Public Gazetteer, 21 April 1759

As recently as the 1980s the pedigree of football in Ireland could be traced along a neat linear storyline, a small and tidy litany of football references in calendar roles, legal cases and newspaper notices.

It has become clear since then that this list is just a tiny snapshot of the evidence that is there for the widespread playing of football on Sundays and holidays. An army of local historians have devoured newspaper files and are producing more newly discovered references with every summer school. Football was a game of the people, in the same sense and possibly across a greater geographical spread, than hurling was.

The first legal reference to football in the calendar rolls came from a legal case in 1308, where a bystander at a football match in Novum Castrum de Leuan (the New Castle of Lyons), John McCorcan, was charged with accidentally stabbing a player, William Bernard. A field near Newcastle, Co. Dublin, is still known as the football field.

A Statute of Galway in 1527 prohibited citizens ‘at no time to use the hurling of the little ball with hockey sticks or staves but only the great football.’

The newspaper references are all of a similar type, giving notice of a prearranged venue and a time, an editorial of condemnation, an assizes report of an injury or affray (as in Dublin and Athlone in 1850) or a report of disorder or a raid by a military party, but truly useless in giving any indication of rules, winners or heroic performances.

For these we must turn to surviving poetry, of which there is also a considerable body. Séamus Dall Mac Cuarta wrote a football poem, ‘Iomáin na Bóinne’, about a match in Slane in the early 1700s. Matt Concanon described another on Oxmantown Green in 1720.

Travellers’ descriptions are also useful, notably John Dunton’s famous premonition of the 1983 All-Ireland final, when he found football in Fingal in 1699, noting that the citizens ‘trip and shoulder very handsomely’. Eighty years later another traveller, Coquebert de Montbret from France, found football only in Leinster.

Where football was referred to in poetry or the press, it was assumed that readers needed no introduction to the rudiments of the game. Ideas, we are told in the vortex of constitutional debate in the 1780s, are ‘tossed around like footballs’.

‘Is there any day of the week that can cope with Sunday for all sorts of revelry throughout the nation’ the Freeman’s Journal asked on 24 January 1763, and then listed some familiar pursuits: ‘for goff matches, football matches, hurling matches, wenching matches?’ An 1838 proscribed list went ‘hurling, communing, football playing, cudgels, wrestling’.

‘Birr—Last Monday there was the greatest match of Football that was ever seen in this Kingdom, between the married men and the Bachelors of this town.’

Pue’s Occurrences, 23 August 1746*

In Dangan, Co. Meath, in 1731 and in Birr in 1746 the local bachelors played the married men. When the Liffey froze over in 1741, the citizens of Dublin played a football match on the ice. In 1754 a party of soldiers and constables were called to break up a football match in Baggot Street. The sheriff surprised a group of footballers on Oxmantown Green later in 1754. The bakers played the brewers of Dublin in a football match on Royal Hospital lands in Kilmainham in April 1765, and another match took place in Milltown the same month. Contemporary newspapers objected to the ‘profanity’ of players who disregarded the establishment’s strongly held views on how the Sabbath should be observed. Their indignant pronouncements were usually accompanied (in what must be admitted was an extremely hostile press) by reports of how the matches degenerated into drunken faction fights. A riot resulted from a match near Finglas bridge in 1759. A ‘desperate quarrel’ ensued from a match at Three Rock mountain above Rathfarnham in 1779. Soldiers quelled a riotous mob who assembled weekly to play football in Drumcondra in 1774, and eventually in 1792 in Timolin, Co. Kildare, ‘A match at football between the villages in this neighbourhood has been attended with effects particularly distressing. The lads met on the green at Ballitore, from whence, when the sport was over, they, with many of the spectators, adjourned to this place in perfect good humour; but the demon of discord, whiskey, soon introduced a battle, in which all were engaged and almost all suffered.’

Wogan Browne of Clongoweswood was a magistrate for three counties when, in 1797, in the words of his friend Valentine Lawless, ‘He was some Friday riding past a field where the country people were about to hold a football match. The whole assembly of course recognised and paid their respect. He got off his horse and opened the sports by giving the ball the first kick—a sort of friendly sanction of the amusements of their neighbours which was then not unusual among the gentry in Ireland.’

So far, this is not very different from the references to football that can be found throughout mainland Europe or England in the eighteenth century. What is of significance to us is what patterns emerge that lead us to Davin’s game. One is the significance of the county team selection. Kildare played Meath for ‘a piece of plate’ in the eighteenth century, and Meath played Louth ‘for a piece of plate and fifty sovereigns’. Kildare and Meath teams met at Maynooth in 1845.

There are also interesting questions from some researchers that the phrase, Iomáin, as applied to hurling in the romantic and heroic literature, might sometimes refer to football as well as hurling.

All of this gives us a clue as to how football became so widely played throughout the country, despite the vagueness of those 1885 rules. Football was clearly a familiar and widely played game in Ireland before the GAA. But for decades it had been in decline. The playing surface was a problem. Graziers were no longer happy to let footballers trample over their land. The Commons listed in those eighteenth-century newspaper accounts, Oxmantown, Crumlin, Lyons and Saggart, were enclosed one by one by Acts of Parliament in the 1810s and 20s.

It was going to require a greater state of organisation to organise the playing fields for a new generation of footballers. And like canal boats, not one but three football organisations came along at once.

‘Irish football is a great game and worth going a long way to see when played on a fairly laid out ground and under proper rules. Many old people say just hurling exceeded it as a trial of men. I would not care to see either game now as the rules stand at present. I may say there are no rules and therefore those games are often dangerous.’

MAURICE DAVIN, 13 October 1884

The man who invented football was an astonishing all-rounder, even for an age of sporting all-rounders.

What Irish football was he talking about? The Fenian papers mention allegations that football matches were used as a cover for military recruiting or training. One informer, Pierce Nagle, a teacher in Powerstown close to Clonmel, said he was at four such matches in 1863.

Dublin University’s rules of 1854 were possibly the ones in use by the Munster football teams that sprang up in the 1860s and 70s and played against each other. The first newspaper report of a football match in Tipperary is a harvest home affair at Longorchard in the Freeman’s Journal of 21 November 1856, while goalposts were specially erected at Coolarne, near Athenry, for a football match reported on 22 October 1866.

The first modern football notice advertised a Trinity College match in the Dublin Daily Express of 1 December 1855. The Irish Times carried its first proper match report, Trinity v Wanderers, in December 1860. Newspaper accounts of the spread of rugby, as in The Irish Times of October 1879, decry the lack of progress of the game in Munster. The writer may have been looking in the wrong place.

South Tipperary was, then as now, a stronghold of football in a hurling county. A Fenian informer, Pierce Nagle from Powerstown in Clonmel, said he had attended four football matches on Sunday afternoons after which military instructions were given by a man named Ryan.

The Kilruane Football Club, founded in 1876, recorded matches against Carrigatoher Cricket and Football Club, Killeen Football Club, the 53rd Regiment of the British Army stationed at Nenagh, and the Nenagh Cricket Club. The club acquired two footballs and a ‘Book of Football’, so the rules were likely those for rugby. The Carrick-on-Suir Athletic, Cricket and Football Club and the Killean Cricket and Football Club both followed in 1879.

Killarney, Valentia, Ballyhar, Firies and Killorglin had clubs. In Dingle, Seán Ó Dúbhda recalled that young people called the form of rugby they played in the 1870s ‘the scrummage’ and a match played there in 1884 was ‘between rugby and Gaelic’. In Killorglin, Pat Begley told the folklore commission that later GAA champion captain J. P. O’Sullivan ‘captained the rugby team’. O’Sullivan, whose son Eamonn was to attain fourth place at the 1932 Olympics and become the most famous team trainer in Kerry football history, started the club (according to Begley) after one rough-and-tumble match ‘between Ballymac and Ballyvourney’.

‘Rugby was installed, with soccer on the way coming.’

PAT BEGLEY describes football in Kerry in the 1870s

What rules were used? What shape was the ball? It is hard to tell. Intriguingly, Paddy Foley’s book about Kerry football, Kerry’s Football Story, published in 1944, refers to the fact that Australian football ‘is played with the oval ball as was early Gaelic football’. But we get the best picture of immediate pre-GAA football in the Irish tradition from the five matches reported by the Cork Examiner in Killarney in April and May 1874 and again in March 1875. The Irish word cúl (goal) is the only type of score mentioned. The match of 26 April 1874 was reported as follows:

FOOT BALL AT KILLARNEY, SUNDAY

This match, which has been the general topic here during the past week, came off today. The Killarney team, not being quite pleased with the finish last Sunday, gave a second channel to Poulnamuck men, and both parties met at the usual place. Seldom have I seen a larger concourse of people meet in any ordinary sport.

Immediately after second Mass crowds of people might be seen weaving their way in the direction of the field. Our Killarney young ladies were not backward in putting on an appearance and their presence on the field, no doubt, tended much to animate the highest efforts of several who took part in the game.

The Poulnamuck men won the toss for points, which was much in their favour as there was a strong breeze blowing, but it was settled at the outset to change the goals every half hour, so as to give each party a share of the wind.

The ball was thrown up at half past twelve amidst loud cheers. Although it was laid down that there should be no tripping, as on last Sunday, and that all should play fairly, friendly and good humouredly, yet during the first half hour’s play there were some heavy spills which called forth cheers from both sides.

The Poulnamuck men succeeded in getting a few cooles whilst they played with the wind, but as soon as the half hour was up, and the Killarney men had the wind at their back, the scale was turned. The townspeople scored ten cooles against seven on the other side.

There was an amount of confusion throughout which made the game unpleasant and uninteresting at times. The field was very badly kept during the play and were it not for the united efforts of a few gentlemen who assisted in keeping the field clear, there would be no sport at all, as it was kept indeed, I cannot boast of the order maintained.

At three o’clock there was a general drop-off on both sides, with a hint to meet again at Muckross next Sunday when it would then be decided which were the better men. As far as this day’s proceeding went, the Killarney men came off best.

Correspondent